Artists Like Me
Artists like me was Júlia Vavra's graduation project for the SNDO - School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, and has since been developed in new contexts by the creative team. The performance is a fiery slap in the face of the system of relations that drives the contemporary art world, where, more than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Western art institutions and schools still hold the valid modes of expression and career paths in art.
Schedule
In the performance, Júlia Vavra works with artists from Hungary who present themselves as fictional personas of the "emerging Eastern European artist": they welcome with their own naivety when a curator sees unpolished talent in us, they professionally sell their own identity or they bang on the doors of reputable institutions begging for admission to finally get the ammunition they need to get started.
The piece is an ironic reflection on the palpable contradictions of contemporary artists' expectations: that while artists must constantly maintain a critical discourse, they must also accept their own self-exploitative, precarious working conditions and lifelong indebtedness. The extent to which social mobility within the EU is limited, determined by capital concentrated in the large institutions, and where the no-longer-sexy central Europeanism is nothing more than a moderately interesting exoticism, associated with buzzwords such as goulash, palinka or Orban, is starkly highlighted.
